Lido Pimienta

One Liner: Spanish language critical darling doing cumbia art-pop

Wikipedia Genre: Synthpop, Latin-American music, Art pop, Cumbia, Bullerengue
Home: Toronto (by way of Columbia)

Poster Position: 19
Both Weekends.  Saturday.

Thoughts:  I heard one of her albums a few years back because NPR named 2020's Miss Columbia as their #3 album of the year for 2020.  Which is a little whack - the top song now has 6 million streams.  I know that the best music doesn't necessarily get all of the streams (see Drake's dumb streaming counts), but at the same time you aren't the third best album of the year if people don't care to listen to you.

Her stage name is her real name, and she is Columbian/Canadian.  She won the Polaris Prize (goes to the best full-length Canadian album each year) in 2017 for La Papessa.  She was born in Columbia, but then immigrated to Canada.  She is currently based in Toronto.  Somehow, the Globe and Mail (a Canadian newspaper published in multiple cities) called her the future of Canadian rock and roll.  This is very distinctly NOT rock and roll.

But maybe this is: "There was controversy surrounding her performance at the Halifax Pop Explosion music festival on October 19, 2017. Pimienta, as she often does during her concerts, invited the "brown girls to the front" and asked that white people move back. Some white audience members saw the request as racist, and a white volunteer photographer refused to move from her spot near the stage. When the photographer refused to move after repeated requests, Pimienta said, "you're cutting into my set time and you're disrespecting these women, and I don't have time for this". The photographer was removed from the show and the festival organizers later apologized to Pimienta, saying they would increase "anti-oppression and anti-racism training"."  WTF man.  If I was close to the stage, because I'd been saving my spot for the Chili Peppers all day and peeing in bottles and achieving peak heatstroke, I'd be annoyed if she made me move back for my skin color.

The top track is from Miss Columbia, and is called "Nada."  I actually know what that means!  6.2 million streams.

Her voice is fantastic.  I just wish I knew what she was talking about.  Not feeling anything special on that track.  But, her voice, and the steel drums, on "Te Queria" sound freaking amazing.  Just a sweet vibe on that tune.  All of her more recent releases have been with other people, so I'll go back to the old school to give you one of those old songs from the first album.  This is "La Capacidad," with 538k streams.

Yeah, still a dope voice.  Almost like a freaky Bjork thing going on there.  But not my jam as far as the tunes go.